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Saturday, November 18, 2006

“If you are to live the joyous life that you came forth to live you must allow yourself to be that which you have become.” Abraham-Hicks

My daughter Jasmine has gotten me in touch with the teacher “Barbie” who says at the end of one of her movies: “Big or small, there is a difference only you can make.” Another teacher Joseph Jaworski wrote that “One of the most important roles we can play individually and collectively is to create an opening or to ‘listen’…then to create the dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen.” Abraham is a “family of teachers” from another dimension, Barbie is well, Barbie, and Mr. Jaworski is a former corporate lawyer turned leadership visionary; but whether you are a plastic doll, an ethereal being from another plain or a high powered lawyer it seems that everybody is talking about the same thing. That we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

And where does this happen, this unfolding of our true self into an ever expanding realization of all of that which we are? Yoga would say, along with all of the other truly sensible entities who’ve ever said anything, that this unfolding happens in only one time and one place ever. If we are to allow ourselves to be that which we have become the time is now. This explains to a large extent why the contemplative traditions place so much emphasis on learning to bring ones attention into the present. It also explains why defending and enhancing a false self is such a self defeating proposition.

According to Yoga the second of five afflictions that humanity suffers is a habitual maintenance of a fictitious persona; a maintenance that requires all of our energy. The hallmark of our fictitious persona is that it is a mind made story that comes to us from the past. It is never about who we actually are in this moment In fact who we are now, and who anyone else is now, is irrelevant to the story that is our persona. Does anyone whose job entails potentially dropping bombs on children really go around saying I have thought this through and I am o.k. with causing the occasional innocent child’s death? Even when my job entailed killing and I had made peace with it, it never occurred me to consider my actions from someone else’s point of view; to consider the families. Wrapped up in what Eckhart Tolle calls the “story of me” we are to a large extent divorced from reality.

An aspect of reality is our emerging self that is constantly being born. To be in the story of me is to be stuck, like a wheel in mud, in a lifeless static dimension. Present moment awareness has the capacity to free us immediately from this condition. The consciousness freed from propping up our persona is now available to experience directly the deeper aspects of our existence. That which we have become vibrates powerfully within us and is encountered immediately upon becoming still. Getting still is the beginning and it is experienced as grace. Allowing takes faith, courage, and love; the faith, courage, and love that moves mountains. Big or small there are mountains only you can move and the time is now.